scalliano's 667 Shuffle! - IT'S BACK!!

[Moti]

I agree with 95% of what TOZD said.
I love the new version, but I still have a few nitpicks (and ones that I've said plenty of times before and aren't fixed).

- Hand Grenade and Zombieman Rifle has a better preference than an SSG. Why is that?! These are very weak and when I run out of, say, plasma, I'm ready to take down the monster with a SSG shot, but no. A Zombieman Rifle pops up and I get blasted before getting to switch weapons.

- Same as TOZD spotted: Sniper instead of a BFG? I am currently playing Kama Sutra with your wad, and at Maps 14 and 15 I got a Sniper Rifle instead of the BFG. That made the maps awfully harder and almost unable to finish, had to depend on luck.

- Agreed at reducing the Diabolist's power. It can take your HP down from 100 to 5 AT SIGHT.

- My game seemed to crash while trying to save on Kama Sutra Map31. Now, it wasn't the first time I saved (nor my 30th..) in the map, but it seemed to crash and give me a fatal error after the Infernux Grand was activated. Could it possibly be a problem with the monster itself?

- Hectebus, regardless to it's extremely high painchance, should have its HP lowered to 1200 or something.

- Archon of Hell should have its HP reduced to 1500.

Regarding some of TOZD's complaints:
-The Bruiser Demon may be tough, especially in tight spaces/places with zero hiding. But, regardless to that, I seem to be able to KB it with a single SSG shot. It spawned in the starting area of Kama Sutra Map10 (square, doors, one square in the middle with windows), and seemed to take it out very easily.
-The Nazis are unchanged because... Well, they basically have zero use in most wads, except for the secret maps. Kama Sutra Map15 for example uses one Nazi. The monster isn't Doomish anyway, and since this wad is trying to go on the Doom side, the Nazi was probably left unchanged because of it's mere use.
-Demons and Spectres have identical spawns, but that doesn't seem to bother me because it's really no difference other than looks between the two.
-The Sonic Railgun and the Skulltag Railgun are completely different from each other. The Sonic Railgun is way inferior, because its firepower is identical or even lesser than a Chaingun's, and it's altfire is still lesser than the original Railgun's fire. The Skulltag Railgun is faster and stronger in terms of damage.
-About the Add-on, I doubt Scal will make it as it probably does take a while. Also, I wouldn't want to use the Quad Shotgun instead of SG/SSG, as much as I adore the weapon. Also, the machinegun sucks comparing to the chaingun, and the earthquake effect is annoying. If you really want that, I'd suggest doing it yourself. The weapons are mostly good as add-ons, not replacements.

Whew, that was a long post. Gonna get me something to drink now.

[scalliano]

@Moti: I currently have no idea how to change weapon preferences. If anyone here can give me a hint I'll gladly look into it as it is something I'd like to fix. I'll also check out the save-crash issue, although I haven't been able to replicate it at this end yet, no matter what version of ZDoom I use.

@TOZD: I'll remove the Shotgun from the SSG's roster and add the Sniper Rifle to it. Also, the Nightmare Spectre's DECORATE code has been fixed so that it spawns as it should, rather than flat-out replacing the regular Spectre.

Moti hit the nail on the head regarding the Nazi Guard. This enemy is almost NEVER used and giving him a spawn roster seems a bit of a wasted effort. I might do it in the future, but not after I've ironed out all of the kinks first. I will include the Rapid Fire trooper, though.

The Railgun and Sonic Railgun are significantly different to warrant the inclusion of both. The ST Railgun is more or less an instagib weapon for the most part and the Sonic Railgun is much weaker, but has a much faster rate of fire. There are actually 3 Railguns if you count the powered up Unmaker.

I'll look into balancing out the monsters' HP a bit more, granted, 500HP is a bit much for a Demon replacement, but with regard to their spawn weights, the reason the emphasis is still very much on the stock enemies is because I don't want the randomization to be too chaotic. Given that most of these monsters have more health than their stock id counterparts, it could have an even more adverse effect on gameplay balance if I gave them all similar spawn weights. I could reduce the stock monsters spawn weights a bit and have the zombies randomly drop the medium ammo every so often, but the stock monsters spawn weights will remain higher than the custom ones for that reason, and I don't want to have to resort to nerfing every single monster in the mod. As you said yourself, this isn't AEoD.

One last thing, bar the orange Motherdemon message (beats me), there are only a handful of "Tried to register "monster X" more than once" type errors on startup (regardless of ZDoom version). This is pretty harmless as some monsters share projectiles and spawns. The rest of the bumf is just ZDoom reading what's in the PK3 and is perfectly normal.

[NeuralStunner]

@Moti: I currently have no idea how to change weapon preferences. If anyone here can give me a hint I'll gladly look into it as it is something I'd like to fix. I'll also check out the save-crash issue, although I haven't been able to replicate it at this end yet, no matter what version of ZDoom I use.

Weapon.SelectionOrder number

The lower number is, the more preference it has. Weapons like the Rocket Launcher that are dangerous to the firer should have higher numbers, powerful ones should only have particularly low ones if their ammo is plentiful (like the Plasma Rifle).

[scalliano]

Thanks, I'll get on that

[ThatOneZDoomer]

Nice to know you addressed some of my feedback, especially in regards to monster balance. While I may not have come off as such, I'm not saying that the new monsters can't be stronger than the original monsters at all, but just to an extent. They don’t work too well fresh off the site in this kind of mod without adjustments. I haven't fought any of the boss monsters yet, so feedback on they may come later.

• As for changing the spawn weights around a bit, does this mean that the Minigun has a better chance of spawning? I didn’t even know it existed in the mod till I decided to give myself all the weapons just to see if there was anything I missed.
• Although the Zombie Man Rifle's coding doesn't have a weapon selection order, I think the default one is low enough that it ends up being selected over many other weapons. By default, I mean what the base weapon actor has pre-set if sub class of it doesn't set it. Although not directly toward this mod, I noticed a lot of mods, likely most of them, mess this up and think a higher weapon selection order means that you'll select it first. This leads to cases of switching to fists or a melee weapon after running out of ammo for any weapon.
• True enough that the Nazis are very rare which is why I mentioned just using a similar Random Spawner for them because how it would be a mostly copy and paste job. But even then, it's not like they would mess up anything in the event that they do show up.
• Maybe I was a little hard on the ST Railgun, especially since between that and the Sonic Railgun, they seem similar enough that you could "merge" them by editing the coding of one of them. I suppose the weapons are left unchanged because of wanting the weapons to feel familiar so that they'll work like you expect it too and not be like "huh? Why does this work differently than I expected?"
• In the case of monsters sharing the same projectile actors and SpawnIDs, those should be possible to fix without much trouble. For monsters that share the same projectiles, it might be possible to make a common wad that includes actors used by multiple monsters as to avoid them being loaded more than one. Another way is common actors could be renamed so that they remain unique to each monster. As for the SpawnIDs issue, I don't think you would need to keep the SpawnIDs since the monsters in this mod are not being placed directly on the maps or getting spawned through scripts. I think you can safely delete them without any errors. While this is just really nitpicky on my part, I also think there may be an actual good reason behind making these changes, at least in the case of having the same actor names. Saved games tend to have problems with same name actors and fixing them should remove any save game issues, at least in theory. This isn’t limited to just the latest SVNs either, but even older stable versions.
• I don’t think anyone really commented much about the new items yet. For the most part, I think they fit in pretty well, although I think the Regeneration Sphere is too weak to be one of the replacements for the Mega Sphere. Filling up health by five slowly up to a max of 100 is pretty weak compared to 200 health and armor. Maybe it would be better fitting as a Soul Sphere replacement.

[/nitpicks]

[scalliano]

Granted on the Regen Spehere, I could probably have it replace something else. Regarding the shared actors, I'm not averse to giving the mod a cleanup, but I'll be doing that later.

The weapon selection order is now fixed. I've given the Zombie Rifle a higher value than any other weapon, so it will never be selected in preference over anything more powerful (ie anything at all ).

SpawnID's were never really an issue to begin with. However, as a precaution I did remove all of the custom monsters' DoomEd numbers just in case anything clashed.

And I've decided to make all of the zombies (bar the Repeater, Unmaker, Sniper and Flamer Zombie) occasionally drop the medium ammo kits. This should help in some way towards preventing a stock ammo shortage. I've also removed the quake effect from the machinegun. It's the only weapon that has it and I'm not a huge fan of it, either.

I should have an update posted later tonight with these changes.

EDIT: One more thing: the Afrit is now officially fixed in the latest SVN builds of ZDoom and GZDoom.

[Gez]

SpawnID's were never really an issue to begin with. However, as a precaution I did remove all of the custom monsters' DoomEd numbers just in case anything clashed.

Doomedniums and spawnids are different and unrelated values...

[scalliano]

I knew that.

[NeuralStunner]

Who is DoomEd anyway? Wasn't he like the first modder ever?

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[scalliano]

I heard he went off the rails pretty badly

New version uploaded. See above for changes

[atar]

This mod includes all the custom weaponry and bestiary from the 667 site? Thnx in advance

[Ogerz001]

This mod includes all the custom weaponry and bestiary from the 667 site? Thnx in advance

if you read the first post you can find out.

[Gez]

This mod includes all the custom weaponry and bestiary from the 667 site? Thnx in advance

No:

Yes, it's another random spawner WAD! This one is meant as a means of playing Doom with some of the monsters/weapons found on the R667 pages [...].

[chronoteeth]

Keeping it style consistent is a great touch.

[scalliano]

The mod is growing with every version, but it will never have the entire R667 archive. As great as the likes of AEoD and the Scoredoom resource wad are, I got a bit fed up of seeing Heretic/Hexen/Strife/whatever stuff in Doom. I'm kind of a semi-purist - I wanted this mod to stay as "doomish" as possible.